Wine Recommendation
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Wine Recommendation

CedarCreek Estate Winery 2006 Reserve Chardonnay, Greata Ranch (Okanagan Valley)

Greata Ranch Estate Winery

2006 Reserve Chardonnay
(Okanagan Valley)



This exceptional Chardonnay is the first release since CedarCreek relaunched Greata Ranch as an exclusively super-premium winery. Greata Ranch is a historic tree fruit farm near Peachland that had become derelict until CedarCreek bought it in 1994 and planted vines on about a quarter of the property. Taking advantage of the property’s spectacular lakeside setting, CedarCreek now has begun developing about 500 vineyard residences. The owners of those properties will get first crack at the Greata Ranch wines.

Winemaker Corrie Krehbiel, who was born in Kelowna in 1975, started working on the CedarCreek bottling line while still in high school. Encouraged by CedarCreek’s winemaker, she trained as a winemaker in New Zealand, rejoining CedarCreek in 2002 as an assistant winemaker. She became Greata Ranch winemaker four years later, charged with making only reserve-level wines.

This is an elegant Chardonnay, featuring pristine citrus, tangerine and peach flavours, subtly supported with oak. The texture shows the richness of careful lees aging. There is a lingering finish. The wine is packaged in what might well be a custom mold - heavy Burgundy glass with a punt so deep that the bottle will be a hit at proctologists’ conventions. 90 points.

Reviewed March 19, 2008 by John Schreiner.

 

The Wine

Winery: Greata Ranch Estate Winery
Vintage: 2006
Wine: Reserve Chardonnay
Appellation: Okanagan Valley
Grape: Chardonnay
Price: 750ml $25.00

Review Date: 3/19/2008

The Reviewer

John Schreiner

John Schreiner has been covering the wines of British Columbia for the past 30 years and has written 10 books on the wines of Canada and BC. He has judged at major competitions and is currently a panel member for the Lieutenant Governor’s Awards of Excellence in Wine. Both as a judge and as a wine critic, he approaches each wine not to find fault, but to find excellence. That he now finds the latter more often than the former testifies to the dramatic improvement shown by BC winemaking in the past decade.